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Archive for December, 2007

Hitachi seems to be having some financial trouble, but might this also indicate that we’re approaching the end of hard drives (as we know them)?

Hitachi Ltd., Japan’s biggest electronics conglomerate, plans to exit the business of making small hard disk drives as demand shifts to flash memory chips, the Nikkei business daily reported on Sunday.

How about that penny-sized 16 GB memory chip from Intel? It is even smaller than those SD cards which were able to contain 4GB about 2-3 years ago. It’s quite amazing. “All human knowledge in a matchbox” prophecies are drawn nearer.

F traffic-jackers are a sign of Website maturity, then the mysterious birth of www.schestowitz.co.cc and www.schestowitz-com.co.cc should be a compliment. I had similar ‘issues’ over a couple of years ago. I wonder what other domains were born to capitalise on typos or a name.

Why am I linking to this? Just to provide an example of silly conspiracy theories. Not all of them contain substance or truth (as much as wishful thinking and fantasies). Consider this as an example of things that falsify these theories: why is it that aliens — who supposedly come from distant and independent planets — always have the same scale as humans, who also look alike? It’s moronic. It contradicts the laws of probability and it’s statistically impossible.

I do believe in life in other planets, but it’s more likely to exist in bacterial form and not involve inter-intergalactic travel. If you look around the Web, you’ll find far crazier (and more laughable) characters than Mr. Cooper. Whether it’s drugs or sleep paralysis that led them to ‘believing’, who knows?

VER time, I’ve accumulated a few notes about things that I bear in mind while surfing the Web or communicating with people. Here’s a quick breakdown.

Saving Evidence

Corporations, unlike us mere mortals, don’t care about preservation more than the law requires. That’s why the Bush Administration, Intel, Microsoft and many other companies purge E-mails and shred documents without any guilt or hesitation. I should really make copies of everything I cite (I rely too much on the Web Archive). A friend of mine wanted to automate this and create archives of all my posts, plus local copies of cited articles. With wget, these can be sorted nicely by URL, but I never do this. If you have any tips, please leave a comment.

WWW Privacy

A person can always use a proxy if there is fear of having IP addresses harvested. I set up this thing for myself a couple of years ago and I had to make it password protected because lots of people from Asia used up my bandwidth. Then, the only server that ever sees my IP address is mine. You’re essentially passing requests through a trusted middleman.

Since all routers are peers as well, there’s no way to get perfect independence from other people’s vigilant eye. One option is therefore to use Web mail via proxies, but then you’re still relying on the the proxy not giving away its log files (or destroying them every night).

I suppose you may have heard by now about the police demanding encryption keys from an animal rights activist over here in Britain. There’s increased mail monitoring as well, which is why I suggest that people get themselves covered. There’s also that Blogger (Google) incident from last month. Google gave away the IP to the police and used some excuse. Think of mini-microsoft (the blogger) and many others who rely on anonymity. Without anonymity, they will lose their jobs. It seems like an approaching end of an era. Authorities require greater control. They exposed too often, so they misuse their powers.

E-mail Privacy

Have you readers considered encrypting your E-mails? I do this with people who can. If you’re using Thunderbird and there’s an extension called Enigmail that will make it very simple for you to set up. It’s cross-platform too.

Remember that privacy is among your right. Don’t let people take it away from you and essentially treat you like a criminal. With less privacy, you are left powerful and exposed.